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Steve Jobs Wasn't Impressed With Some Of Apple's Best Ads

Remember those awesome, silent-disco-y iPod ads with dancing silhouettes set to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” Caesar’s Palace’s “Jerk It Out” and other great mid-00s songs memorable only because they were in those commercials? Well, Steve Jobs wasn’t a fan at first.

“It’s not Apple,” Jobs said, when first presented with the campaign, according to Ken Segall, Creative Director of Chiat/Day, the agency behind the ads.

In his new book, Insanely Simple:The Obsession That Drive’s Apple’s Success, Segall writes, “It didn’t look anything like any of the ads that Steve had approved in the past –which were mostly white pages featuring a product image and a clever headline.”

Chiat/Day was also behind the Mac vs. PC ad campaign a few years later, about which Jobs was also initially apprehensive, rejecting many iterations of scripts. He held a similar stance with Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign in the ‘80s, calling its original script “shit.”